


Fine Distinctions

by tielan



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M, One Night Stands, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-18
Updated: 2011-08-18
Packaged: 2017-10-22 19:34:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/241752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As she told Mal when she first hired out Serenity’s shuttle, Inara doesn’t pay her debts in sex. That’s not the way she sees her calling. The distinction between business and pleasure should be maintained.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fine Distinctions

As she told Mal when she first hired out _Serenity’s_ shuttle, Inara doesn’t pay her debts in sex. That’s not the way she sees her calling.

The distinction between business and pleasure should be maintained.

\--

The townspeople are so pleased to get news from further out in the ‘verse than their local administrator looks, that they serve up their best to the crew of _Serenity_.

Their best is considerably worse than even the worst that Inara’s used to, but she’s good at smiling and accepting what she’s given: soggy _huatip_ , overcooked _uong-tsoi_ , and the dried spiceplums have a bitter aftertaste to them - doubtless stored a little too long.

Although she raises her eye a little at the wine, she takes a few swallows and finds it not as bad as she thought. Dragonfruit, well-aged, not quite the quality of the Core vineyards, perhaps, but good for a rustic village on a quiet little planet.

She ignores the nudges and grins and leers of the men and boys who watch her drink. Whatever their grannas might have told them, dragonfruit wine isn’t an aphrodisiac.

She’s in perfect control as she puts the glass down on the cottonweave tablecloth, and only rolls her eyes when Mal holds his cup out for a grinning refill.

\--

The first time is fast and rough.

Rough palms on her arms, rough fingertips on her thighs, rough cheek by her jaw. A rough swipe of his tongue at the join of throat and shoulder matches the rough thrust of his body in hers, and she shudders in pleasure at the raw passion of it. Here, there are no silken words, no gentle caresses, no tender lies - just desire.

Panting in rough cotton sheets, Inara is surprised to discover she enjoys it a little rough.

On her shoulder, a stubble-rough cheek shifts but doesn’t actually lift from off her, the weight of him pressing her down into the straw tick as he mumbles, “I think I broke something.”

Inara laughs as she reaches up one hand over his bare shoulder to push back a strand of hair that’s fallen over her eyes. “Don’t be a baby,” she says without a trace of sympathy. He doesn’t need it - she’s never broken a man in all her career as a Companion, and she’s not about to start with Mal Reynolds.

Mal props himself up on one elbow, damp flesh shifting all over her body. “Are you calling my manhood into question?”

In answer, Inara bends down and sucks his lower lip into her mouth - dragonfruit wine and dried spiced plums - then flexes her muscles around him and smiles as his lips part in an ‘oh’ of pleasure. “Do you think I’m calling your manhood into question, Mal?” Beneath the guest-house roof by the light of the single candle that gives him a bronzed tan and darkens his eyes so they’re almost black instead of the usual blue-grey of a stormy sea.

“Feels good,” he says and shifts his hips a little. Inara bites back a moan of pleasure. “Do they teach you that at--” He hesitates and his eyes drop to the pillow before he answers. “Companion school?”

She knows what he was about to say. They both do. Inara chooses to ignore what he was going to say in favour of what he did say. They’re new to this. Missteps are going to be common on his side, even if she’s trained to avoid social _faux pas_.

“They teach us a lot of things at the Guild,” she says, tracing her fingertips down his spine in the pattern known as Dancing Butterflies. Mal shivers.

“You could send a man mad with want for this,” he groans. “How’m I supposed to retaliate?”

“You’re not,” she tells him, her breath whispering past his ear.

He shivers, but his mouth slides along her throat, up to her earlobe. “So I’m just to lie here and take it?”

“Why not?” Most men do.

She shifts beneath him, crooking her thighs around his hips and then rolling them over in the bed so he’s beneath her, lean and naked, straddled beneath her. Her hair, unbound, falls around her jaw and shoulders, light as a caress, and she tugs it over one shoulder then stops when Mal’s hand twines into the long, dark waves.

“What’s a woman like you doing so far from the Core?”

There’s no real query in the question, it’s a wondering murmur, a thread of thought in the dizzy warp and weft of this evening. Still, fear catches in her throat, a breath untaken, stunted for want of space. She covers it - that moment of terror, of ‘run-and-hide’ - and shifts his hand to her breast, leans over to kiss him.

Answers she doesn’t want discovered are discarded in favour of something simpler, something familiar. A man who desires, whose desire should be simple as his fingers stroke her body, brush her nipples.

But when their mouths part, there’s still something in him that questions. “This is supposed to be a distraction, right?”

Inara thrusts gently, rolling her hips into his, keeping him hot, keeping him focused. “Is it working?”

He pants. “I think so.”

“You think so?” She keeps the rhythm going, slow and steady, feeling the burn begin inside her even as her hands mark out the chakra of his chest, the pleasure points, the lines of sexual energy.

Beneath her thighs, she sees him brace, but the thrust back against her comes as a gasping surprise. There’s a gleam in his eye when she rises up over him again. “Gonna need to continue a mite longer to check.”

It’s almost a game, to see how far they can take each other, how long they can hold out. Nothing exists beyond the walls of the guesthouse, beyond the edge of the bed. It’s just their bodies and the long, slow rhythm of pleasure taken, pleasure given.

The nightflutters circling around the candleflame flit shadows across the wall as their sweat-laced skin shifts and pulls, drags and slides, and the tide of pleasure rises to sweep them both up.

Mal groans and shudders beneath her, and it’s not only a relief but a pleasure to come in the last quivering moments of his orgasm.

\--

In the safety of her shuttle, Inara’s fingers fly across the keyboard, seeking information from the Guild’s database.

Companions are taught to recognise all the standard chemical enhancers - the aphrodisiacs and stamina enhancers. Some people have entirely the wrong idea of what it means to hire a Companion, and the idea is to deter them, one way or the other.

There are lessons in which Companions are taught identify the tastes and smells of the various chemical aphrodisiacs and hypnotics. Inara wouldn’t have expected to find them on a planet like last night’s, and she certainly didn’t eat or drink anything...

Realisation scrolls beneath her fingertips as she reads through the listings. The dried spiceplums and their musty flavour were the culprits in main, but the dragonfruit wine was a catalyst. Between the two items - wine and spiceplums saved especially for guests - she didn’t have a chance.

\--

Mal never mentions waking up naked and alone in a guesthouse after a night of too much wine and some very erotic dreams. It’s not the way he’s used to seeing Inara.

He wouldn’t mind it again, but he knows better than to ask.


End file.
